# PlanetScale Strategy: AI Agents and Database Infrastructure

**Podcast:** The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
**Published:** 2026-08-25

## Transcript

Well, friends, welcome back.
Summer is over.
The show is back.
Some of you just can't get enough.
Let's just say you can't get enough.
And I'm here to bring it to you.
This week, I'm joined by a good old friend, Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale.
One of our first conversations happened back in January of 2022.
So we had a lot to cover in this pod.
We talk about the new $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the story behind Metal.
Spoiler, they are not racking and stacking their own MVMEs.
They build on the hyperscalers bare metal machines, the smart way, the cursor demo they have where agents optimized a database and shipped it safely through deploy requests.
Why you can roll back a 500 terabyte schema change as fast as a one megabyte change and Sam's genuinely unresolved wrestling match over whether to open source.
Nikkei, their new sharded Postgres product.
A huge, massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at Fly.io.
That is the home of changelaw.com.
Learn more at Fly.io.
Okay, let's get into it.
Well, friends, I'm here with the CTO of Buildkite, and one of the most challenging problems of modern era software development is continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Lachlan Donald, BuildKite CTO.
What are you thinking about today's teams, the challenges they face, the speeds at which they're developing new features, new code?
It is just overwhelming.
How do you all think about that?
Such a good question.
It's the question everyone's asking right now.
All of our big customers are asking us at the minute, like, you know, if we 5 or 10x our throughput this year or 1,000x it, what breaks and when?
And, you know, my answer is...
Kind of same as it's been for the past 20 years, which is that the bottleneck is still trying to integrate those code changes in and then deploy them and check they work and then keep them working as you keep throwing more and more code at it.
I think a lot of the fundamentals are the same, but we're just a thousand X-ing the speed of it.
And, you know, that changes nearly every variable.
Yeah, for sure.
OK, so where does BuildKite thrive?
What particular type of team?
or enterprise do you thrive in?
The area that BuildCut has always thrived in is like this like fastest moving tech companies of the world.
Like we've been disproportionately successful in that small niche, the kind of Shopify class, Uber class.
you know, open AI class of folks that have this key problem around iterating really, really fast.
And, you know, the thing about all of those folks is they all have subtly different needs, subtly different problems.
And so we've tended historically towards building like really well engineered Lego blocks that scale like orders of magnitude more than.
what our nearest competitor does.
So, you know, I think that that puts our system in this tension where, you know, you've got to spend some time assembling those building blocks, those Lego blocks to get the thing that you want.
But the end result is far and away more performant and scalable and the experience is better than what you get from something that's off the shelf.
So I think we've started from a position.
of really well engineered logo blocks and then are kind of working backwards towards kind of creating the thing that scales down to a startup that starts with one person and 10 agents next week well friends go to buildkite.com that's buildkite k-i-t-e.com you deserve better ci engineer for the frontier we are all facing trusted by the teams setting the pace again buildkite.com once again Buildkite.com.
Friends, I am back with an old friend.
It's been several years, about four years, Sam, since you've been on the pod.
Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, one of my most favorite databases that I don't use.
I'm so sad.
Sam, I am on the list of trying out Metal because who doesn't love a good NVMe, right?
Oh, yeah.
Got to have that performance, especially with databases.
Inside the server, disk, magic.
Yeah.
You know, I always felt like, you know, PlanetScale was out of my realm in terms of what I personally needed because you're just so good.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
What do you think, Sam?
Luckily for folks like yourself, we now have a $5 Postgres option, PlanetScale Postgres.
Very accessible.
The price of a can of Diet Coke in the fine but expensive city of San Francisco.
And so like very well priced for people that just want to get going and have some simple Postgres.
all the great features of planet scale bundled in um it's there we're ready come through give me a landscape of what planet scale is today the last time we talked was in january 2022 now i know the audience pays attention to you but just for those who may not have caught up since then or they just want to lay out the land what is the the landscape of planet scale these days i know you're in postgres world and you've got sharding you've got metal i've mentioned that already but give me a zoom in to what you're doing yeah so A lot has changed since 2022.
That was like the very early days for us.
The earliest.
Yeah.
I mean, things have gone really well.
We, well, right now, we have entered into the world of Postgres, which we announced mid last year.
We have announced our sharded Postgres product, Neeky, which is coming very soon and is already ramping up with customers.
And Vitesse keeps growing and hosts now some of the world's largest databases.
We run very, very large sharded workloads for tons of very large AI companies.
The AI era has been phenomenal for PlanetScale.
We've always presented ourselves, especially in the latter years, right, as...
just a big engineering team as a company that kind of has a very thin abstraction over the top.
So our marketing is very technical.
We're very well known for our blog posts and our technical content and our incredible marketing team, all engineers that spend their time kind of curating for our engineering audience.
And none of us really foresaw this kind of agent revolution, AI revolution.
But it turns out if you're just kind of hanging out and building a database that scales.
to extreme scales for customers.
AI companies need this, and we've been very fortunate to have a load of them kind of come onto the platform and grow incredibly quickly.
And so it's been an amazing time here at the moment.
We're kind of in that era of like, you build, you build, you want to get successful, and then you get all of the sort of success problems and stress to success, and we're dealing with that and scaling ourselves and scaling our various products, and it's just a very exciting time.
at the company right now.
I'm just running around 24-7, meeting customers, getting customers migrated, talking, you know, it's fun.
So you say that, right?
But then I go on your website, to your homepage, and I just search Command-F AI, and I don't see it anywhere.
What is going on?
How are you leveraging and building and growing so well in this era, but yet you're not really seemingly positioned as an AI database?
How is that?
I don't know if there is a specific definition of an AI database right now.
There's definitely AI database platforms, and we certainly have that.
I just gave a talk at Cursor's conference yesterday where I showed off 10 cursor agents working on the PlanScale platform.
The whole point of the talk is they went through a bunch of performance optimizations.
deployed them very safely and you know this is the thing that's really cool about plant scale is we built this for humans and one of my slides that got shared quite a bit on twitter was that we built this for the flakiest agents of all humans if you remember when we spoke in 2022 we were all about allowing people to ship really really quickly safely like we have database branching of online schema changes we have rollbacks for those schema changes we block agents from pushing um schemers into prod that would break queries.
We have traffic control that isolates workloads and does QoS for databases.
Like we have all these like incredible features to make databases extremely safe for humans or their agents.
The thing that communicates that we're there for AI is the fact that the best AI companies already work on our product and use it.
We use AI behind the scenes to deliver insights to our customers and really good things for our customers.
we don't need to necessarily scream the words AI over and over again.
Like you see these companies that don't really have a clue what they're doing and their marketing team has been told by the CEO, we need like an AI narrative.
We need like to just, and they just slap AI on everything.
And it's just like not good.
It's just, it's insulting to the users, whether they're AI companies or not.
Like things did not change that dramatically, but we do use AI and the AI companies use us.
And that's the important thing.
Can you give me a glimpse into, what's required behind the scenes to do what you said with cursor.
I think you said you had several agents provisioning, deploying to PlanetScale.
Can you give me a zoom into that?
Yeah, that's actually another part of the talk that was key.
Like I didn't want the talk to be just one big demo of PlanetScale.
It wasn't a sales pitch, right?
But the key points I was actually making is that infrastructure platforms are going to change now to give insights to AI, right?
You know, there's so many database companies out there talking about the day one.
Oh, wow, we're the fastest to spin up a database and then like put it to sleep and never use it because it's agentic or whatever.
That's like really not how software is built.
Like day one is day one.
Great.
Like it's the point of creation.
It's fine.
You pick any stack.
It doesn't matter.
PlanScale, although you should start your startup on PlanScale at $5 because then you don't have to do a switch.
And like we have an unbelievable amount of startups in the new YC batch.
um building on plan scale for this reason they know the ones that you used to default to just fall apart um at basically no scale um and so we um we really focus though on like day one you've got to get going you've got to build but it's like day 1000 is where the real problems show up when it comes to maintaining right like any infrastructure is like this is like a big living city um and it's complicated There is so many interacting services.
And you'll get your most productivity from AI working with existing code bases that need constant pruning and evolution, maintenance and care, which humans have to do.
Agents can go and do this.
And so what we do now is we generate prompts and instructions for agents.
And it is us scaling our expertise through infrastructure services.
And like giving it to the customer very directly and giving it to their agents very directly.
And that takes an immense amount of infrastructure behind the scenes.
So we take traces and log the performance characteristics of every query that hits our platform, which is tens of millions of queries a second.
And we have to stream those, data warehouse them.
We have to...
like apply our various algorithms to detect whether they're using indexes or not.
Like we've had to edit Postgres core, MySQL core to go and do this all to like generate a three line prompt for an agent.
And so you, you turn this like depth of infrastructure and expertise into this insight for agents and these emergent behaviors then get observed and become the next instruction for agents.
And it's an incredible amount of infrastructure and plumbing behind the scenes.
This requires our platform to be very complicated and well managed.
And we've achieved that.
And it gets this very simple flow where I could just go on stage and say, optimize this database.
And Cursor's agents went away and got recommendations from the system.
We are very early to this.
There's very few infrastructure providers that have built this way.
It's because we were early to understanding that humans break databases and we have to make them make sense.
Our developer experience is superior to...
most companies out there, especially in the database space.
And so it's not hard for people that have built developer experience for 20 years to figure out how to get agents that same experience.
Yeah.
And so that's where we go.
Take me to the technicals of this.
So you have cursor in this demo, let's just say in your talk, optimize this database.
What happens?
Is cursor talking to MCP?
Is it an API?
Is it a CLI installed into cursor?
Help me understand what enabled that query and that question to happen.
Yeah.
It loads up the plant scale skills and the plant scale MCP and asks plant scale, what, what do you have for me?
What insights do you actually have for me?
Rather than just like we're in this stage of most people are just like, pointing agents at like massive streams of logs or just a code base and it's like very difficult to get the agents to sift through that and find the right thing and so we make sure that it gets very narrow instruction make this add this index remove this index um scale this cluster like all these various things that the agents can actually act on and they will take the mcp so they're going to do the code and then they will also hit the API to go and spin up a dev branch to go and do the work on.
And that's where the next chapter comes in, I guess, which is they get the instruction, they figure out what to do with the code base, and then they need a really safe, isolated way to test their work.
And so they will use plant-scale branches to have an isolated dev-like environment.
Sorry, production-like environment for dev where they can't break anything.
And then the thing that we truly no one else does is we get that change into production.
in an incredibly safe way.
So there's like a gate.
It's the deploy request, right?
Like it's like the pull request.
The same people that like designed the pull request work here and, you know, are doing the deploy request here.
So like there's various things.
There's like, first of all, we stop agents screwing things up before they get to.
So we block you.
I'll give you an example, right?
Like an agent has screwed up and they want to.
And I demoed, like we poisoned some agent instructions to go and do the wrong thing.
and they got projected from doing it, we then let one through so we could show what happens even if the worst of the worst happened.
And I'll tell you that scenario in a second.
But basically, if you go to drop a column in prod, which is a common thing, like when you're doing a refactoring, you want to get rid of this data, you don't want it in the database.
If you have referenced that column within the last 24 hours with a query, we block you from deploying it and we show you what queries have referenced that column.
It's a very common source of outages for people.
It is to think they are no longer accessing that column or table or whatever.
And they are.
And we will stop that happening.
And we prevent outages every hour for customers when they are like we block many, many bad changes going in.
We then have the scenario where we allowed that to go through and it did drop the column.
And then we have another feature for fixing that, which is we fire anomalies to say this is broken.
You have broken your database.
Query is now failing.
And we can roll that change back instantly.
And it brings the old version of the table back with zero data loss.
Like even if we'd done intermediate changes to the new table, they are still going to be in the old table and we can bring it back.
And that is, again, nobody else does this in a platform.
We are the only people, only platform that has this capability for databases.
And so you can see it's these like small, sharp tools.
of a tool chain that get an agent from dev to production safely can undo changes.
These changes are all attributed to the agent.
Like you go into a plant scale graph and you'll see a line that goes down the graph that shows when it was deployed.
And you can then like see exactly what's gone wrong.
And then once you've gone and made like changes and it looks good and it's like fine, we generate more for you to do if it needs to do more.
And so it's this constant loop.
that goes round and round.
And so now agents are building PlanetScale for us and deploying their own work for us in extremely safe environments against...
We see customers doing schema changes on 500 terabyte tables and they just get it done.
And by the way, you can roll back a 500 terabyte schema change in exactly the same time as a one megabyte schema change.
It will be exactly the same.
That's pretty astounding.
to even think about this kind of changes.
And I think what I think about is the primitives you probably built upon.
So you've been doing this for a while.
Developer experience focused for so long.
And so that's not just magic wand waving.
That's literally, hey, we're developers.
We use this every single day.
We're improving it based upon our developer needs.
Just even your data warehouse where you pull logs into to gain insights is a clue to that for me.
But you have primitives you're built on, so branching.
You've got these safeguards.
You call them gates.
Help me understand how those gates come into play to give that insight but also block you if you're going the wrong direction.
How do those gates appear to the developer when it comes to DX?
They look very tactile, and they look...
like we expect from other products, right?
Like the deploy request is really meaningfully meant to look like the pull request.
It communicates, it shows you a diff of your schema, even though you didn't send us a diff, you did schema changes on a branch by using the normal DDL that MySQL or Postgres supports.
And then we show you a diff.
It should feel like your other tools.
And then for an agent, it...
the same thing just looks and feels native to them through MCP servers or APIs.
And like we have pass-through mode for our CLI, so agents can arbitrarily call API endpoints that we have set up for our own use.
So they get these abilities.
Like in the talk, I talk about the Unix philosophy of these independent tool sets that humans or agents can gather together to get what they want.
and what they need and compose their own journey.
Like you might not be doing a schema change, but people spin up a planet scale branch every time they do CI so that CI runs against the branch.
And so it's basically running against a copy of production or a system that behaves just like production.
And it's just about being, getting out of the way, but blocking you from doing the wrong things.
There's another way of thinking about this, which is...
I've been in databases for a very long time on very large products and services.
And I basically took every outage that I'd ever seen.
And we're undoing the ability for that to happen.
I think for me, I'm curious, what is the most exciting thing happening right now?
Obviously, you've got a boom and we've got a boom in the industry with AI.
And there's a lot of speculation of bubble bursting, just a lot of, I would call it, Fear, uncertainty and doubt, FUD, obviously.
But aside from what might be the obvious answer, what is the most exciting thing happening for you personally in PlanetScale?
So the thing I'm most excited about right now is watching Niki get built, which is our sharded Postgres solution, like the test for Postgres.
In the last five years, we have spent so much time and work.
like evolving for tests from something that was a very raw open source project that was being used at very few companies to now something that's like a generally used to cloud product.
And people interact.
It's like impossible now to be a consumer in the U.S.
or a knowledge worker in the U.S.
without interacting with products that run on planet scale.
We have Cursor.
They use us to build, to just run gigantic sharded databases that back all of the product interactions that Cursor.
Builds including Origin, their new products running on us already.
We have Kick.com, Pokes Interaction, Lime Scooters, every Square swipe, you know, whenever people are buying coffee or, you know, on Square terminals, that's going through PlanetScale, Cash App, just extremely large consumer products that need a very scalable database and they need sharding run on PlanetScale.
And now we're bringing that to Postgres.
It's been phenomenal to watch a team of experts, like the world's foremost engineers on this subject and field that have the experience of running these gigantic workloads in production on our cloud, now bringing the same to Postgres through Neeky.
Not just how quickly they're building and who is rolling out.
Like right now we're moving another set of just huge Postgres workloads at very, very well-known companies onto Neeky.
And then watching that go is just phenomenal.
bringing sharding and the sort of traditional practices of database scaling to the new audience that is the Postgres audience that is full of very dynamic startups.
Postgres is definitely the database of choice for new companies and AI companies.
And so I'm just extremely excited to see the demand.
Like we actually, there's so much demand for this product that we have companies just, I had to just very gently tell the CEO of a startup, like they told me it was unfair that they weren't being given.
first access to this product.
And I just have to say, you know, we have a queue.
Unfortunately, we're working with a lot of people right now and we're trying to rate limit the demand.
It's, I've never seen anything like it.
And so it is a, yeah, it's a, it's an effort in like technical mastery.
And it's also incredible to see that we've landed in this part of the market.
And there's so much need for the thing that we are so good at.
So you have quite a queue for Niki and would you, I'm coming from the outside.
So help me.
uh shape of lens here but is nikki uh synonymous with vitess in that vitess is my sequel nikki is postgres is that are they correct i would say that nikki is more evolved in the sense that if you're doing a do-over on a 50 like vitess is 15 years old now getting a do-over yeah well i mean i don't want to leave too much of the architecture right now but like i mean we certainly we learned there was like at youtube there was youtube did not design it to be a general purpose system it was designed purely for youtube um and so there was mistakes that were made or not even mistakes actually i will give that i will say they were not in any way mistakes no i think it was more i think it's actually i would have less respect if they'd have gone and done that work because at the time that would have been an over optimization they did things that worked for youtube and that was about it if they tested evolve over time to be used by a bunch of other companies, but they were still hyperscale and they were like pretty custom.
Niki is built with 15 years of a test knowledge, five years of planet scale knowledge, running it directly on the cloud and learning everything we'd learned and building general purpose systems.
And then just getting all of the different things we want to add new features, new user experience on top and, and built by, you know, The union of all those things.
It's an, it's an amazing piece of software.
Where does, I understand the tests and my sequel and the relationship there helped me understand.
Nikki, is this something that is proprietary?
Will we ever have our own hands on the software?
The, the, I mean, it's not open source, is it?
We have not decided yet.
I'll be very transparent.
We have not yet settled on whether we will open source Nikki or not.
Unfortunately, we've seen.
some people, some companies, very popular ones in the database space, be very, very misbehaving when it comes to other companies' open source projects, claiming credit for them, forking them.
like hiring someone that's 15th on the maintainer list and saying they now maintain that project, just things that are very bad and that didn't really used to happen in the early days of open source.
But, you know, there's a new generation of people that don't really understand these things.
I think it's so cutthroat.
It is too cutthroat, yeah.
They use their position and they use their leverage to try and do these things and their voice.
And, you know, I don't really want to see that happening.
And then there's obviously Amazon who are an abysmal player in the world of open source, no matter how much they try and whitewash that.
and a terrible partner.
And so working with them and seeing them, well, I mean, like, listen, they have, they have a sharded product called Limitless.
It's amazing name.
Yes.
I saw this amazing tweet once where someone said we have had so much fun finding Limitless's limits in production.
It was great.
So the largest database that ever ran on Limitless runs on PlanetScale.
They had an average two outages a day on Limitless.
And so now we have Amazon telling people that the new version will be much more like Vitesse.
And it's like, well, it's open source, so they can go and try and do that.
And so Amazon, the bounds at which Amazon will try and screw over small companies or the world of open source is unlimited.
And so...
When it's been proven that we are better engineers in databases than they are now, it wasn't the case back in the day.
We weren't around then, but the early teams that built the early databases at Amazon were phenomenal engineers.
They just don't work there anymore.
Also, the largest database that ever ran on Uncharted Aurora now runs on PlanetScale.
So PlanetScale, it's just our bread and butter.
All day long, we move databases off of Amazon's products.
And they behave very poorly as partners with that.
They tell people they're going to make their software like us.
And so we do not know what the future of open source for Niki will be.
It will take some deliberation, but it is because of people like that and some other startups in the database space that it's causing, you know, it's just, we're seeing it everywhere.
People are moving, removing tests, removing this stuff.
It's just because the same bad players are behaving badly.
And now.
You know, it used to be much harder to copy pre-AI, but now people can like slot fork.
But even like they can just kind of move a lot faster in interpreting the code.
Like back in the day, you had defensibility because most people couldn't just read the code and understand really what it was doing and what the tradeoffs were and how it could be done better.
Now AI can explain it to them.
So it's desperately sad that these people do this and that...
that companies are even willing to work with them, but they're the kind of casino you have to work with them.
And so it just means that I don't have a good answer.
I'm not going to pretend to know what to do.
We may still open source it.
It's just a world where you have to kind of play with your hand closed nowadays because of, you know, if you are a rising company that's threatening others that are already more incumbent, they will do dirty tricks and I would never want to give them any advantage.
Yeah.
Well, you're touching on a very...
I would say a very interesting hot button for me.
I'm not sure how much it's out there.
I think it is.
I'm actually, oddly enough, in this day in my age, less slurping up what's on X and less slurping up what's on LinkedIn and places like that.
I'm just sort of like in my own world in a way, which is kind of good because I've needed a mental buffer for this reason.
But I've been in this thought process of like, you know, the primitives you build on, the seemingly crown jewels that you would normally open source.
because hey let's let's make this primitive available for others we built on it let's meet this let's be cool right it's just a good thing to do i just it's just a good thing to do earlier in this room i interviewed a friend of mine jacob who runs a company called pierre he created twitter bootstrap and we were kind of talking about how open source used to be used to just do it because it was a good thing to be and now it's got a very you know i dedicated my life to opens i worked at github for seven years right like i I supported the world of open source and I watched it from the inside and the nuances of it.
It's a very fragile ecosystem.
As a collective, the open source world is one of the greatest things humanity has ever pulled off, right?
Sharing our work for the betterment of humanity.
It's why we have AI today.
It is very sad to see the cynicism that has overlaid open source because of the way commercial companies have behaved, especially ones like Amazon.
You know, I'm not sure.
I know that's your lens and I'm curious if you feel it's just simply human nature.
I think it's human nature.
We're, especially here in America, we're all capitalists for the most part, right?
Like we're running companies, we're building companies.
Well, that we can talk about, actually let's talk about that for a second while we're on capitalism.
I love capitalism.
I think capitalism is the greatest vehicle for it.
But I am so capitalistic that I think these large tech companies should be breaking up, broken up.
I should not be competing with my own company by buying a rotisserie chicken at Whole Foods.
That should not be allowed.
Like that, that, that is just fundamentally anti-competitive.
Let's look at AI.
Google saw the early versions of AI very early.
And Peter Thiel is completely correct that Google have run out of imagination based on how much money they have in the bank.
They've stopped innovating.
They use, they use the fact they have Google search, which is, they earned that.
They earned and then built one of the greatest businesses of all time with Google search.
But they saw the early version of AI and they had the research and they just sat doing nothing.
Just wasting the opportunity.
And then others came up.
OpenAI.
Thank God for OpenAI that woke up and built something and lit a fire under Google.
And then Google get to wake up in the world.
Like the speed AI is moving right now an age later.
And there's almost no consequence for them because they still have a massive search business.
They still have so much capital to throw into AI.
This is not good for innovation.
I am not.
I'm not this kind of socialist kind of breakup tech companies, anti-billionaire.
Like, I think it's phenomenal that people put rockets in space and get...
gigantic rewards for doing so i think we should be making more billionaires that get to make more things and build things and that should trickle down i think this is the true spirit of capitalism if you look at the forefathers of capitalism the people the way that in in the young america people talked about opportunity they did not foresee the kind of leverage that these giant tech companies get and it's hurting innovation these sleeping lazy giants sit on innovation and it doesn't hurt them that is not good for the general innovation of humanity I like that.
We're going to coin that sleeping lazy giants.
So at the same time, you say forefathers of capitalism, they were cutthroat.
Oh, you should be cutthroat.
There was probably murder even.
Like this is back original OG business days, right?
I can only speculate.
I'm not speaking from a biography by any means, but I imagine there was a lot of cutthroat.
And if there was a version of open source, they would certainly glean from it.
Like they're not benign.
Right.
Just because it was early.
Right.
Yeah.
But also open source came from a cap.
Like, I mean, they tried, right.
It was like Microsoft.
Let's not let them let's not remember the October letters.
Let's forget the October letters.
Not forget that they tried to kill and suppress open source.
You know, they bought GitHub to undo this and they have done a good job and they have done some great open source.
But capitalism, big organizations like Microsoft did try to stamp out open source and it did not work.
And there is still a very rebellious, almost political movement of open source.
Again, they take it too far in some areas.
But it did thrive in capitalism too.
There was a net good.
But I agree with you.
But I don't...
The early forefathers did, you know, the...
Crony capitalism is not what they wanted.
Some of the early decisions around contract law are why America has such an incredible economy now, because you could get a fair shake in court.
You can still sue and get your day in court and win.
And that is extremely important.
So I don't think it's worth viewing capitalism as always having to end up in a very cynical...
everyone's going to screw you.
But I do think you have to be cutthroat.
I do absolutely think.
I don't mean to say that.
I just mean that I think it's human nature and I'm with you.
So I'm in a way narratively lamenting the scenario we're in right now from a position that the changelog is by and large been supporting open source since the year after GitHub was incepted, like the same year.
Like I think GitHub was born in 2008.
We were born in 2009 and we've been riding the wave of open source moves fast.
Keep up since the beginning.
Well, friends, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Coder.com secure environments where developers and agents work in parallel.
And I'm joined by Nikki Pike, field CTO for Coder.
Nicky, what is a field CTO?
So I get that question a lot and it's, you know, half the people understand it, half the people don't.
So a field CTO, I describe it very simply as we're DevRel for the C-suite.
So we provide a bridge between the customer voice, between the C-suite and the managers and the leadership teams of our customers back into our product.
And then we go through and we help enable our teams to have the same message to make sure that the message is correct and that we're building on something that people actually want, not just something that we think they want.
Okay, so we're taking the laptop away from the developer.
Not really, though.
We're putting them in a cloud development environment, a secure environment where they can work with their agents in parallel.
These are blessed environments.
What's wrong with the laptop?
The laptop is the trap here.
And not only because the fact that it could be stolen, you could lose it, it breaks, and you're out of work while you're waiting for a new one.
But there's also just the consistency that you got there.
We all know developers.
Developers are going to be looking for some of the latest and greatest.
And if you're not really controlling how they get out there.
That's where you get this.
It works on my machine.
It doesn't work in production.
It doesn't work anywhere else because you don't have that consistency.
You don't have that ability to really standardize what that environment looks like.
And this is a problem not only for new people coming in, you know, the onboarding statement is average, I think, is like four to five weeks for a new employee to really get their local laptop set up and ready to start doing their first time of code.
And, you know, the time to first commit is a metric that almost everybody knows.
And the reason they can't do that is because there's a lot of tribal knowledge out there.
They got to go talk to other developers.
What are we using?
Where do we get our dependencies?
Are we getting them?
from public?
Are we getting them from private repositories?
But there's also the security and the supply chain aspect of this.
When you have local machines out there, look at like the Shai Halud, you know, that virus that went out not long ago.
This was a compromise of the NPM public repositories.
They went and downloaded things.
NPM did what it did.
Next thing you know, you're compromised.
But when you use something like what we're doing with cloud development environments, then you can mandate and you can put restrictions on there to say, hey, you can only go get your packages from our private repo.
Those packages are expected to have been thoroughly vetted.
We know that they're clean.
Now, does this stop everything like Shai Halud?
No.
If that compromised package gets into your private repo, you can still have that.
But it really reduces the surface area of the attack.
And it also reduces the blast area of the compromise should it happen.
Because if your laptop gets compromised and you have to kill the laptop for whatever reason, that's weeks out of work while you're either fixing that or you're getting a new laptop in.
The cloud development environments allows you to kill that.
start back up fresh and you're back and running in five minutes.
You don't have to wait all that time.
Well, friends, the first step is to go to coder.com, install Coder, self-hosted environments for your teams to enjoy, to standardize around.
And it's open source.
So you can try it out today.
Once again, coder.com.
And so as that same person, I'm sitting here today saying, okay, Nikki, is it going to be open source?
I don't mean that like, hey, Sam, give away your crown jewels.
I just mean like, how do you?
battle this struggle?
How do you deal with this struggle of like, gosh, we're in this scenario where my most fiercest competitors that have more than me, they can kibosh me, maybe not technically, but maybe with a purse potentially or a war chest.
How can I give them my 15 years of a test, my five years of running PlanetScale and just hand that over in open source?
It's a very challenging position to be in, but yet we come from this past thread.
of lovers and supporters of open source.
Yeah.
It's hard.
I don't love thinking about it this way.
And like I said, I used to say we would never do Postgres.
Here we are.
I just don't know.
You did say that when we talked in the first time.
Mm-hmm.
I mean.
You're like, might as well go for life.
Right.
The test for life.
Right.
And I changed my mind on that.
And I'm still, I do not mind being consistent.
Like I'm here, you know, my public stance is I think about things very openly and I express my feelings and I have.
Absolutely.
Like people, when I tweet about stuff, people love to dig up old tweets.
It's like some sort of gotcha.
As if like, I'm like, change their minds, man.
Correct.
I will change my mind faster than you.
The world changes.
Correct.
I get no embarrassment and no shame from not being logically insistent.
In fact, my bylaw, one of my things I say in my like kind of.
description on Twitter is I'm making more mistakes than you.
And I'm actually very proud of that.
Like people, again, they read that and they get it wrong.
And they're like, oh, it's a guy's proud of making mistakes.
Stupid.
I genuinely deliberately make mistakes.
I move extremely quickly.
I believe life is like a spread bet.
You have to make mistakes.
If I said to you, there's a target down range, I'll give you a million dollars if you hit it.
Choose a sniper rifle or a shotgun.
What are you choosing?
You choose a shotgun because you're going to get, I don't know how many shot they go and put in a.
shotgun but you're going to get more chances than the one sniper shot if you bundle everything into one big decision you better you better not miss well yeah with a shotgun blast and i learned this in the early days of github that culture was incredibly iterative we would put something small out learn iterate build i just will not i don't i refuse to to ever stick to anything in the past i have i have almost to a fault zero respect for the past or time for the past.
I just want to see what's tomorrow.
And if the most offensive, horrible thing I can do to my competitors is open source sneaky, you bet you'll be done in days until then.
I think the best thing I can do is I'm watching some being built in the open.
They are years behind us.
I'm watching us take Amazon's best swing and moving customers off constantly.
So right now I'm keeping that for ourselves, but who knows?
We'll see.
Yeah.
You know, I would struggle just as much as you are right now with that choice.
And if I were you, just speaking out loud here, I'd probably keep it on the inside for now.
Just because what do you gain?
Yeah.
Like, who do you help by open sourcing Niki?
That's the question.
And then even with open source, there's so much change.
Maybe you could speak to this too, potentially, as you...
as you weigh these pros and cons, is you see a lot of change in open source.
You mentioned it pulling tests back, all sorts of things, not accepting pull requests, not accepting contributions.
So we're open source.
Sure, you can use it.
It's still the free gift.
It's still the USB stick on the front curb.
Thank you very much.
But we don't accept any contributions.
It's just in-house only.
So there's no...
And then you've got the Mitchell Hashimoto direction, which is like, let my current...
contributors, you know, I think I'm sort of, you know, TLDRing in a way what they're doing, but it's sort of like a merit-based, if you've done some good things or somebody suggests you, you can kind of come in kind of thing.
And I could be wrong on that.
Again, I'm sort of out of the loop to some degree on certain things, but I feel like the scoreboard and the way we participate in certain open source, not all open source, but certainly high stakes open source, like something like Niki being open source, for example.
There's a different game being played.
And it's just a little unfair to release your crown jewel that helps you do so much.
And then what do you really gain from giving it away?
I don't know.
Yeah, I think about this.
And I don't want to criticize anyone who's done...
Like, there are people that you have to find your own path in this world.
And people do amazing.
Like, open source maintainers are saints.
Like, the things they put up with, it's harder than ever.
Now, I just want to say that, like...
You are all incredible people.
And I hope that we all find a better path forward for this.
Maybe it's licensing.
I don't know.
But like, I really hope so.
So I would never want to seem like I'm critical.
We're losing from this too, right?
Like we're still not the size of Amazon.
So still when we're working with these gigantic businesses, they're like, well, I know we know plant scale is profitable and has lots of money in the bank and is going to be around forever.
But, you know, it'd be easier if like.
We knew because, you know, we've never had an enterprise customer churn, right?
We've never had a sharded customer lever.
So we've retained every dollar of enterprise business.
And they know that, right?
And they know that it's like not incredibly easy to go from if Planetsco is the best, most scalable database, if we hit the limits of that, like they know that they're not going to turn around and do it tomorrow.
But if a lot of the code was open source.
it does give them more of a sense and a feeling that they have a plan if something was ever to happen or we got acquired or whatever right so we're losing from this too and maybe that's why amazon behave the way it's because this way is because it's easier for them um to stymie us if we know that we can't do that i don't know it's but it's sad and it's not an easy situation and i will always come back and update you on as my thoughts change but right now i'm i speak like a lot of the people you've mentioned as being like shining stars of open source, I've had this conversation with people and we're all trying to find our way toward like figuring this out.
Well, I mean, if you can give a demo with cursor, have it do some cool stuff with insights and you could do the same thing with the code base.
You can look at somebody's code base, whether it's even from a license perspective, you can graph intent.
You can.
Oh yeah.
You know, you don't have to copy code these days to copy the idea or even to.
I don't want to say copy is like a bad thing.
You know, we've all been copying.
We've been standing on the shoulders of giants for a long time.
But it's really just an interesting space where you have a super intelligence available for most anybody with 20 bucks on most of the planet that has access to these tooling and to learn to.
to replicate.
You can do it nefariously.
You can do it altruistically.
You can do it from so many different angles, but the point is the primitive, the ability is there.
Take me back to this unfair advantage of Niki.
I don't want to blaze past that with how deep you went in the feelings you have on today's open source, but what is this unfair advantage?
How long is this list and why do people feel?
Take me further into that remark.
Well, there's two sides to this, and you've just touched on AI.
One unfair advantage is that we have, like some of us have spent the last 15 years in our careers working on very large websites or very large database deployments.
And that is knowledge that has not made it into any single model, right?
Like the code that we wrote to solve these problems may do.
But the brains that that code has formulated are still in our heads and precisely none of that has gone in.
And the reason we have very, very large AI companies building on top of us is because they're buying for our expertise.
They're buying for what my engineers will do at two in the morning, paged with a behavior that has never happened before.
That active human brain instructing the agents to fix things and building the pipelines that the agents use.
um is what people pay for so that gives us one advantage which is yeah maybe i'm not 22 anymore doing all-nighters all the time but agents can do all-nighters um yeah so we've got so not only has nikki been the distillation of so many years of experience of incredibly talented people it's been built at a breakneck pace because those people turned out exceptional engineers can do exceptional engineering with ai and we're taking our experience and using it.
And so there is potential for a lot of tech companies that...
Can you hear that?
Yeah.
What in the world?
They're doing construction outside.
That is likely a drill.
It's okay.
Let's see if it passes.
I hope so.
Give me a second.
That was a great question you asked me.
I want to make sure I don't forget that.
Man, you're so good at this, by the way.
Like, I literally...
You know, I...
I've never, I asked you to come on this.
I've never asked a podcast to have me back.
Nope.
Wow.
You stood out.
I still have the t-shirt.
I also don't keep merch either.
Like I really thought you did an amazing job.
So like, I would love to make sure we cry, dude.
No, seriously.
Seriously.
I've been through some stuff, man.
It's been, it's been a journey.
I hope you're okay.
It's.
While we're waiting for this to go, I'll give you a little snapshot.
So behind the scenes, this last 2025 was a challenging year for me and my business partner, Jared.
He's a great dude.
I love him to death.
But we just had differing opinions on how the business should run.
And I just got tired of the partnership.
And I really did.
And I'm sure he got tired of the partnership as well.
It's not like it's a one-sided scenario here.
But we were together as partners for a decade, basically.
And that's a challenging change, really.
And so right now in December of last year, I asked him if I could buy him out.
He agreed.
And so in February of 26th this year, we inked that deal and it's done.
So he's no longer part of the business.
So that's the change.
But at the same time, we have this AI revolution happening.
I've been building a lot of cool stuff.
All the while also podcasting and maintaining this business, but it's been challenging because the world has just changed drastically.
And I've had some imposter syndrome, to be honest with you, like showing up to the show and doing it well.
But to hear you say that is what makes me tell you that seemingly TMI behind the scenes that I would not normally share so deeply with someone.
So I appreciate that.
I want you to wholeheartedly take my encouragement that you should keep doing going forward.
For multiple reasons, PlantScale, we did layoffs.
We were nearly dead at one point.
Things are better than ever.
We are now more alive, ripping business.
We got features like Brex did a report that were in the top 25 of things that startups are spending on now.
We are going.
Wow.
and if you don't push through that you will never get to that and it's really hard your founder too and i literally the story you just told me another creator told me the exact same thing business partner breakup buying them out pain it's very common and like yeah but i'm serious like deadly serious you are p99 amazing at what you do you should not feel and but all the best people feel imposter syndrome i do too like but you shouldn't it's also a long journey to having done this.
Like my whole career has been a podcaster for the most part.
And I can honestly say I haven't built anything technologically that's worth really anything.
So being in the tech industry and not really having any tech to show for it is kind of embarrassing in a way.
No, but like media now is me.
I, you know, media is, is, is hotter than ever now.
Right.
People want to tell a, because there's now like, I remember back in the day, There was like two companies doing the same thing, right?
Like you basically just like in 2013, you had to be the first person with the idea and you can make a big company.
Now there's 10 people, 10 startups in San Francisco going after every bad idea.
And people are differentiating now through storytelling, craft, design, experiences.
I think you're about to enter an age where your skills are more important than ever.
I genuinely believe I look at how we build our marketing team and our buying behaviors are all going in that direction.
Yeah.
Well, I appreciate that.
I mean, I think the business is definitely changing.
I'm still excited about podcasting.
I'm just a little bummed to be alone, even though it was my choice.
Yeah.
And so I'm just navigating some personal motivation, I would say.
And then also I'd think a little bit of burnout and then also some imposter syndrome.
So you mix all that together, you get a really weird suit that just tastes kind of nasty sometimes.
Well, you should come out to San Francisco and feel the energy out here.
Like it will really.
pick you up.
I think it will really make you feel like go to events, see people.
Like, I think you'll really enjoy it.
You'll meet some, a new generation of founders to interview and chat to.
I think it'd be really good, man.
I got a ton of friends out there too.
I mean, I would consider you as a friend as well, but I would come through, come to the office, hang out.
You're more than welcome.
I should just do like a tour.
Yep.
Go see Adam Jacob.
Come see you.
Exactly.
There's a few others that I would so reach out to.
My buddy at render on a rug.
Great guy.
There's a small handful of folks I just like going to hang out with, if they would let me, of course.
Come through.
Right, I think we're going to drill this window, so I'll carry on.
So I'll start editing.
I didn't pick up the editor's name.
We're back.
So we're in this very interesting time right now.
There's a bunch of companies being built by people who've got deep expertise from working in other places.
They know their domain really well, and they can build for the next generation.
and using ai to do that really rapidly like ai scales expertise phenomenally and i do speak to startups where like they're kind of you there's an arc of time and this is how i view us via amazon right which is like five years ago vcs used to tell me you're never going to be amazon well five years later we've got the largest databases from multiple of their products running on them and that people advocate for us over them constantly it's the kind of arc of time when it comes to startups there's an incumbent and there's the rising ones and the things that mean they are struggling right now to respond to a uh to demand they're doing great as a business right now they're the ones with gpus that but but like it's difficult for a 50 000 person organization and you know We have a 50-person engineering team.
They have 5,000 people running engineering on the competing products to us, and we still beat them.
This is because we can move faster.
We are nimble.
We are involved.
We get there.
Large organizations, thanks to AI, although they are trying to keep everyone out, they are at risk because they can't move fast enough.
You don't need masses of people to do stuff anymore.
And so it's interesting, like I'm seeing some young companies that come with a different angle of seeing things and they're going to be truly disruptive.
But I'm seeing some wash against the waves of just the facts of life and the facts of how some software dynamics are.
Again, that may all wash out in 10 years time.
It might be completely irrelevant to have anything we've built.
We might have a God computer that can just do everything.
We're not there yet.
We've got one more cycle maybe before that, maybe a few, who knows.
where some great companies will be built by very experienced people scaling their expertise through AI.
So it's actually an amazing, I've never had more fun.
Like we have a customer at WAP.
They are just phenomenal at what they do and they're young and they're building for their audience and they are just absolutely outstanding and they're scaling incredibly rapidly.
When it comes to consumer, when all these places, experience actually kills you.
Like you don't like...
You can be too old for these things, right?
But when it comes to infrastructure, there are just ways of doing infrastructure that will persist for quite a while.
And there's rules to how that gets done.
And that's how it's going to be for a while, I think.
Help me understand your hardware story, because this is something that I'm personally challenged with is like, how do you compete and innovate against Amazon or even Google whenever you deliver Vitesse or Niki or PlanetScale?
to GCP or AWS.
How do you compete and innovate in their playground, so to speak, their hardware, their world?
Do you build your own machines?
What is your story?
We do not build our own machines.
I think when we named Metal, I think it was a good name at the time.
I think it was kind of obvious what it meant, but people have conflated it with us running our own data centers.
That is not true.
I thought you did.
I thought you bought some NVMEs and racked them and stacked them.
I'm glad you then thought that so I can correct that, which is, We use the bare metal machines that Google and Amazon give us, and we build on top of that.
So that's how we compete.
We take the same machine they do and build our entire software stack on top of it, which means the cost profile of the machine is low because they don't really put much margin on top because they don't really do anything.
But the most impressive thing is those machines are ephemeral.
If we lose one of those machines or we give one back by accident and we misschedule something in Kubernetes or whatever, we would lose the customer's data.
And so we differentiate.
And no other startups are doing this.
There's a few that think they are.
It's hilarious.
We can see the code and like, they're going to lose data.
And so we differentiate by running databases and state, and we run more state on Kubernetes than anyone on earth.
We just actually released a really amazing, Fatih on our team released a great blog post about Kubernetes that is just a wonderful, masterful piece of writing.
I recommend anyone read it.
And yeah, so we build from the base up.
So it means we can perform.
as fast or better than their solutions with all of our DX, agentic AX on top of it.
The higher uptime we are, we compete with them by having higher uptime and just generally a better product while inside the cloud.
This is the thing.
There's a few Neo clouds that have built really well outside of the major clouds.
But if you want to sell to large companies and companies that um are far beyond startups you have to be in aws and google because of latency issues and all of these things um it's we have to be there and so the fact we found the perfect hybrid between on-prem performance and scalability well no we add the scalability on-prem performance inside the hyperscalers cloud is why we get to do what we do We also run in the customer's account too.
It is not on-prem.
You still go to plantscale.com.
It's like bring your own cloud, which I think you and I will have talked about in 2022.
And we were early to that.
It was one of the greatest things we did.
Like we have gigantic customers running it because they are customers of Google and Amazon.
So we run inside their accounts.
And so it means that they secure it.
They pay the bill.
They get like great discounts when you're committing like a billion dollars.
Amazon, you get a decent discount.
And so they can use that.
So we can get the net, like the total cost, like our cost, plus the discount on those hardware costs.
We can often be Amazon on price.
And so that's why, you know, that's how we compete.
Yeah, it's interesting because you have to, you know, it's almost hypocritical, but you can't help it, right?
Because you just said in one second, they're terrible partners, alluding to Amazon.
But yet, you know, you have to play in their world.
So it's like this.
like a masked party and like maybe a masquerading kind of thing.
I'm thinking like a party where you have to go with a mask on, you know, but you're still kind to people.
It's this really weird scenario where you have to play nice, but not quite so nice.
Oh, believe me, like I massively respect them for the position of leverage they've put themselves in.
AWS is a phenomenal business built by phenomenal people and we should have nothing but respect for them.
At the same time, they have to strike a fine balance of, um, competing with the people that run on them, right?
And like how long people will tolerate that.
Now, luckily there's that undoing as well because they've built like what, 350 services and now there's 10 competitors for every one of those services and it hurts for them because they have to keep up and people want the best in class tools.
Unfortunately, the databases are some of the services that make the absolute most money for Amazon.
Like people, I have other CEOs who have great partnerships with Amazon because they compete with less important amazon services say you must i mean i just i just met one of your customers and they told me how much they spend on amazon how much they spend on you like amazon must love you and i was like we have a terrible time because we're competing with the the software that they're trying to the services they're trying to protect the most and so um yeah they behave really badly in that world um and so they just have to be careful and i hope we don't make the same with um some of the large model companies that constantly talk about how they're going to replace everyone it's like I would caution anyone from allowing that to happen again.
Because with AI, it could be dangerous.
It is really bad that you can be an Amazon customer and that they can see you working with someone else and their sales, and then they use that to reach out to them.
And they do do that.
And it is extremely bad.
And there's nothing we can do to stop them.
Yeah, that should not be a thing.
It happens.
It happens all the time.
Our customers tell us constantly.
And so they have to be careful because, like, you don't get to rain forever.
There's other clouds.
And Microsoft actually is not like that.
On Azure, their sales team, the way they operate is much more friendly to the ecosystem of people that work on them.
Amazon particularly really do not do that.
They pretend to, they suck you in.
Like they have released, it's of a company that I think most people think as compared to us isn't really.
But Amazon just released a competing product to them today after having that company on stage at reInvent last year.
So they will pull you in.
It's so funny, actually.
A founder, I can't remember what company it was, tweeted a screenshot of an email they got from Amazon Corp Dev being like, oh, hey, you know, it looks like you're doing really well.
I would love to reach out and see how we can help.
That was sent like six months before Amazon released a competitive product.
And I reached out to that founder and showed him an identical email from me.
I just didn't pick up the phone because I've been tired of their shit for so long that there's no way I'm talking to any of them.
Yeah, it's like, are you a fan of Silicon Valley, Bonnie Chance, the TV show?
It's too close to it.
I've enjoyed watching it, and I've met the producers.
They came to GitHub when they were doing research.
And I know a friend of mine is one of their advisors.
They did a great job of parodying it to the degree where I find it a struggle to watch when I live in it in Silicon Valley.
It's hard to watch.
Oh, and some of the actual props were from GitHub.
I don't even remember the scene where they get delivered merch on the doorstep.
GitHub provided that as a...
as a prop.
But yeah, like it's hard to watch for me is a long-winded answer of saying no.
I've seen some of it and it is good.
Mike Judge is a genius, but when you kind of know people that are just exactly the same as the characters, it's a bit much for you.
Plus, I don't really watch TV.
So there you go, extremely long-winded way of explaining that to you.
The answer is no.
Well, friends, I'm back with a good friend of mine, Michael Greenwich.
Michael, I know that I love WorkOS.
Our audience may not know about WorkOS, but what are the challenges developers face starting a new project?
choosing the right tools, choosing the right database, choosing the right auth.
Take me there.
When a developer starts a new project, the decisions that they make at the very beginning end up having long lasting consequences.
What language you build in, what platform you build on top of, what database you choose.
These are things that are very hard to change later on.
So they have like major consequences.
And especially if they limit your ability to grow and scale, at some point, as the product starts to take off, you're going to have to stop.
developing new product features and go re-architect to rebuild your system.
And that might be a killing blow right at the moment you need to accelerate.
So these decisions early on are really, really important.
And I think that's why developers gravitate towards solutions that are mature, things that they know that will scale, even things that are open source.
You're going to pick, you know, something like PlanetScale for your database provider, not because it's the cheapest or because it's the...
you know, most fun to use, but because you know it's going to be a durable provider that you can scale on for years.
And WorkOS is like that for auth.
You know, at the earliest, earliest days, if you look across all these different services, they kind of look very similar.
But at day 1,000 or day 2,000 or day 10,000, you're going to want to have made sure that you picked a platform that could scale with you.
And today WorkOS is powering auth and identity and security and permissions for all these AI companies, literally the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI and Anthropic and Cursor.
perplexity, WorkOS is under the hood there.
So I think when people pick WorkOS early on, really what they're doing is trying to pick the defaults to allow them to grow and rapidly scale.
And there's no platform other than us that's done that at that same level.
Well, friends, the next step is to go to WorkOS.com, sign up today, check it out, free for a million active users.
Try it today.
There's no excuse not to.
It is your default.
You should choose it.
So do so.
WorkOS.com, Once again, WorkOS.com.
That's okay, because I won't ruin the plot by any means, but I'll just give a glimpse.
I think it was in season two.
It may have been in season one.
They were brought in by a venture capitalist firm, they being Pied Piper.
And they were innovating on this compression algorithm.
And they were hunting for money, obviously, because like any startup, you need money to grow.
And they were brain-reaped, I would guess is probably the proper term.
I don't know if that's the proper term or not.
So similar.
It's like, you know, let's email you.
Let's get you into the room and ask you how your thing works with no intention to invest because they were not intending to invest.
And, you know, because they're naive and they're early in their careers, they gave away information.
They were happy to like, gosh, in these venture capitalist meetings, no one ever asks us how the platform works.
whiteboard the thing for you.
So they literally whiteboard their crown jewels.
And now they have a competitor, let's just say.
Before they did not, now Middle Out, that was pretty much the crux of Pied Piper, was now given to a funded team who is capable with engineers, and they go and build the same thing.
Now they have a competitor.
This happens all of the time.
This is a real thing.
That's the reason why I was on the show.
It's real.
You see a story once a week of someone on Twitter being like, oh, yeah, actually, this company offered to try and buy us and do due diligence, and they used that really poorly.
It's very bad.
I chat to young founders and founders that are new in this, and it's amazing how naive people can be to thinking that these giants are here to help.
and that it's not immensely cut right through.
And it's getting worse.
There is so much on the line.
Like people are terrified by AI.
They are terrified by what it's doing to them, even though they should not be.
It's causing this to happen much, much more frequently.
And yeah, you have to be very careful and very secretive about what you do.
We just don't, we try, like we have learned the lessons and we try not to fall for these things.
Yeah, it must be challenging to even come up on a podcast to have me ask you questions that might go into an area.
I'm sure you're protective of it, but nonetheless, there's some anxiety to some degree.
Like, I've got to be in the public because I want to promote what we're doing, and I'm the CEO, and you have to do your job.
And there's a job.
One of the jobs of the CEO is to be some version of a figurehead to the company and a spokesperson and obviously speak eloquently and have clear thoughts and share your ideas as well.
But then there's a part that's like, well, Now I'm at risk because like if I share too much, you know, how much do I share?
How how do I navigate this this new world we're in?
And I think that's a how do you how do you personally handle that yourself with being in the public?
Because you're pretty you're pretty well spoken in two ways.
Well spoken.
But then also I hear you and I see you on X and I'm like, dang, there's Sam going toe to toe with like benchmarking and like calling them out.
Like you're.
in the most positive way, ruthless, you know, like, I love that about you.
I love the way you come at folks in a way.
But how do you, how do you manage the, the ability to sort of show up somewhere like this, but then also not give it all away?
I think about this very often.
It is a constant evolving debate.
So we're very open.
We're known for our technical content is a great example, right?
So how do you share really deep, insightful things that have a meaning you can tell when tech content is just like fluff right like how do you talk about um really deep things without giving away proprietary things i talk about this all the time at the beginning of every one of our all hands there's a giant slide um that says um confidential on it and we're very clear and i remind the employees that we are incredibly open at plant scale like if you're an employee of plant scale you know you can look at how our finances are When we do board meetings, we present the board deck for the entire company.
I believe in hiring exceptionally good people.
I mean, I cannot self-assign this, but it's something I'm aware of that people would view plant scales having quite a high talent bar and being a small engineering team that's clearly boxing above our weight.
I do not believe in hiring incredible people and then hiding anything from them.
Like every business problem can be engineered.
We are only engineers to engineer ourselves towards building a phenomenal business.
So I share very, very liberally internally, but we have to remind people that you, you might not like, it's very, unless you're essentially myself or like the C level at the company, it is very hard to know whether the thing you are doing or working on, or you might just say, it plays an important role in a very big picture that we don't want to get out there.
So we guard very, you know, we're very protective over what we do, our roadmap, what we're working on.
Like when we built Postgres, we had to work in secret.
Like it had to have a code name so that when we could ship front end code, because we were iterative, it wouldn't be referred to.
So that when we were in South Park, we can talk about what we're like working on without them knowing.
Like we are very secretive in that way.
But we have to do a fine line of like being open and like allowing our marketing team and myself and folks to go and speak on behalf of the company and not leak and mess things up.
And so it just takes refinement and it takes culture and it takes thinking that through.
Like our Kubernetes post we did about Fadi is amazing.
Like it goes very far into showing you how well we think about systems without exactly kind of giving you the keys to the kingdom.
And so it's this constant balance that will, again, it will change over time.
But I try.
When it comes to Twitter, Twitter's a bit of fun for me.
Like half the time I don't take things seriously.
You're having fun.
I just don't mind saying things that I know is going to make people lose their minds.
And it's like, it's just funny to me how easy it is.
Especially also when it just doesn't impact me.
Like I don't get anxiety about this.
I can have a fight with someone online and then just close my phone and never think about it.
I can sleep like a baby.
So it doesn't really bother me, but it's funny when it really lights up some of your competitors and they lose it and whatever and do some LinkedIn posting.
But also like partly the way I'm, on social media is because I do not believe in letting in false truths or things come be said about your company and not jump on them immediately.
I've worked at places where I've watched other companies that just get drowned on social media with things that are not true about that company.
And they are too reserved and polite about it.
They don't squash these mistruths.
I go at that stuff incredibly quickly to correct it in the public record.
um not this i make it sound like there's tons of drama around this company there really is not but you know people come up and say things and they try they do silly things and you know you just call it out and just say it for it is and it's just a it's a way of handling pr and public relations and sometimes companies misstep and you can get out there and correct them really quickly and i watch companies just getting absolutely destroyed in the public narrative and their ceo should just be out there correcting these things saying it confronting them whatever like i've had people say hateful mean things.
I've had the odd death threat too.
I often meet the people, you know, like you just go and say hi and talk to them and make friends.
And I have a few people that I now talk to very, it's a bit of a meme internally that I've had people that have been real haters, like just absolutely hated us and me and now our customers.
And you just, I just reach out to them and have a conversation with them.
Like I'm, if someone, if someone is mad and hateful at me and makes a good point, I like.
you can really flip that by going, yeah, actually, you're right.
I was completely wrong with what I said.
Like I genuinely do try and put controversial things out there, see how people react and then change my mind if I do believe.
And I very often change my mind.
I have zero fear changing my mind.
Like it's my job to do that.
Yeah.
A lot can change.
Well, a lot can happen in relationships whenever you can be transparent, but then also be willing to have a conversations.
Like so many people just don't have the conversation.
Correct.
They would much rather subtweet you or they would much rather, you know, talk about you behind your back or, you know, round about, so to speak.
And I don't mean like negative or positive, just sort of like just about you.
Right.
But, you know, something changes whenever you actually have a conversation with somebody and there's clarity.
And then there's also just transparency in terms of, you know what?
I was not actually totally right here.
I've changed my mind here and I don't feel that way anymore.
Or you were right and I was wrong.
You know, that is what happens there.
Absolutely.
I completely agree.
That is the way to deal with subtweeting, by the way.
If people subtweet you, just immediately go at them.
Just say, I know that's about me.
And then just like react to it.
They stop because they subtweet because they're cowards.
And if you call it out, but people are too polite.
They won't call it out.
And so it lets all this stuff happen.
It's silly.
For those that are listening that maybe be aware of my, I have zero expectation that a single person knows who I am that is listening to you.
And maybe they do now.
Obviously, that's why I'm here.
But, you know, maybe you've interacted or seen my Twitter or whatever.
And there might be people that really think this guy, like this guy, he's a piece of online or whatever.
I just would love to let you know that it is one of our largest sources of leads.
There is a dropdown in our Salesforce to designate their source being my Twitter.
One of the hottest AI companies in Europe came inbound two weeks ago.
Whenever I see, I love meeting customers.
If you read blog posts from our customers.
Yeah, very many out there very many times that they that I will be the first person they've spoken to.
And I will also babysit their migrations.
I'll be in the slideshow.
I love it is talking to customers one of my favorite I don't know people like why are you talking to me?
I'm like, what else do you see over doing and talk to customers work on the prime?
Right.
But like, they're very surprised.
Anyway, I joined I like I saw them come one of their engineers filled out a contact us form.
And I was like, that's a great company.
I want to talk to them.
I added myself to the meeting.
Because I added them to me myself to meeting the founder showed up.
And I said, and this is a great company.
They're going to pay us a few million dollars.
I said, how did you hear of PlanScale?
And he said, I love your Twitter.
And I was like, that's great.
And I said, you can't tell.
I said, unfortunately, like that's going to just make me worse.
But like it is, it works.
And I get told all the time that people just want, they don't hear genuine takes anymore.
Tech has become so mealy mouth and there's fakers there.
It's never been full of, more full of fakers that don't know how computers work.
I think people will feel refreshed.
Tech got a little bit too friendly to the non-technical ones that can yap all day long.
We should drive them out and get back to talking about like actual engineering.
And I think there's a void of that.
And I think people miss it.
And I'm kind of, I'm just saying my stuff.
It's not deliberate.
I might quit tomorrow.
I don't care.
I don't think so much about it.
I'm not obsessed with my follower account.
Like I just say the things I care about and believe and maybe don't believe or want to test the belief in.
And I just use it.
And it's that.
It does come up a lot, though.
It's like people mention my Twitter to me constantly.
Maybe I should change.
I don't know.
Well, I follow you, so I pay attention.
Thank you.
I'm not involved in the conversations, but like anybody else, I lurk.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm here for the stuff.
I'm here for the good stuff.
Sometimes it's drama.
Sometimes it's not.
Yeah.
And I can't really recall the ones, the posts that I'm talking about, but I recall.
other database companies touting their superiority in terms of their speed and their migrations.
Like, I don't even remember what, but it was something like that.
And you were just like, nah, not true.
Like, here's the real benchmarks.
That's how they're being not true with their details because you can fudge that.
Just like calling them out.
I'm like, dang.
Why not?
I love that.
I mean, like, I guess because some people would be Maybe too busy.
Not that you're not too busy, but like somebody might use the excuse of being too busy to come at them.
But that's what I think stood out to me was like that I liked about your personality was that you're not you're not unwilling to push back when you know, you know, maybe of an untruth or a fudging of a number, so to speak, or some sort of benchmark detail that just didn't really fit.
You have a reputation to maintain with PlanetScale.
obviously, but I would say that you are definitely edgy and I like that.
Like, it's not a bad thing.
It's not how I would respond because I'm just not quite that way, but I respect it.
I like that.
Yeah.
Maybe it's just that I'm oddly broken and have brain damage.
I don't know.
I also don't, I don't believe that people are too busy.
If someone is comparing your product technically and lying about it, you should stamp on that immediately.
Yeah.
Like if you care about your craft and I, care massively about the craft of engineering.
I love the database space because it is just engineering.
There are so many companies that have out-talked us, out-yapped us, and now their largest customers are migrating to us because they use Postgres.
We are winning, but it's fundamentally a game of engineering, and I take it very, very seriously.
We are not a very serious culture internally in the sense that we have a sense of humor.
I like to make jokes.
I like to be funny.
I like to be silly.
But when it comes to engineering and we take our job of engineering very seriously, everyone accidentally lets down customers and things.
And now and then that happens with us.
And we take that very seriously as well.
We are here to be a database product.
And I feel like one of the best things I can do to attack my competitors is out-engineer them and then have a lot of fun doing it publicly and build a narrative around doing that.
And they can come for it.
Like when we announced our Postgres product.
It was a very simple blog post.
It just benchmarked us against all the ones that were on the market.
We smashed some of them into the floor.
We had to give two of them.
We had to give them double the resources just so they could show up on the graph next to us.
That was the way.
We showed up humble because we said we weren't going to go into Postgres.
Because we didn't go into Postgres.
I didn't know if we could do anything better.
I didn't want to be arrogant enough and believe that we can just grandiosely show up and do a different database better.
Once we'd shown that we could, though, we made that the point of what we're doing.
All of the companies that we benchmarked got very triggered.
One, actually, the CTO came up to our people.
We released it while we had a booth at a conference.
That day, they walked up to them and got so angry that spit was flying.
Like someone else from another company, a friend of mine whose company's booth was next door, was like, you need to check on your team.
They've just been screamed at by the CTO of one of the people you benchmarked.
I'll save their name.
So big for them to get mentioned on a podcast like for this.
So I won't, I won't.
But they, yeah, it really made people extremely mad.
They all promised follow-ups.
We watched them all benchmarks.
It's been a year, not a single follow-up because they couldn't do it.
So they can sit back down and try and write code and do all their yapping.
They can hire their big brand designers to spend 90 grand on a website.
And we will just do engineering and we'll take that bit very seriously.
And then we'll have fun messing with them publicly.
Yeah, that's wild.
Let's go to maybe an angle I wasn't really going to mention, but you mentioned $90,000 websites.
And I'm not saying that your website is not $90,000.
And I'm not going to try and offend you by telling you how much you did or didn't spend on your website.
But I did it in a Google Doc.
You're not going to offend me.
I did it in a Google Doc.
So it's not.
It was very cheap.
How do you mean you did it?
The first version of that website, and Holly, our incredible CMO, she has a Twitter thread about this.
I was on a trip to see the Redwoods and I was up late at night and I was like, we need to go way simpler.
I just want to, we've got great tech.
Let's just communicate this like a read me.
And so I opened a Google doc and just started drawing ASCII out into it and writing words.
And then Jason, our phenomenal designer, took it, made it look.
like less like the let like sort of scribblings of a mental patient and uh put it up on the internet and it went viral immediately i got invited onto podcasts that have like hundreds of thousands of listeners like marketing podcasts we don't i didn't go on those but like people were fascinated by things things that get spoken about all the time it will change we are going to work on a new version of the website like it it's too simple now it's that format and that medium is too simple to I could communicate the complexities of three separate products and all this sort of stuff.
So it will evolve, but it was very fun to run in the other direction.
Now, by the way, there are some beautiful $90,000 websites out there.
Some companies produce, have insane taste and produce absolutely incredible websites.
We just went very simple for now.
And we're going to, you know, I'm never going to go to these.
Like, I also just don't like it.
It's bad engineering to me when you open a website and it's all.
flashy and like you can hear your macbook spin up and chrome is stuttering like that's bad engineering that does not communicate what i want to communicate but it was just a little silly thing you know this again i just like to do try dumb stuff it works or it doesn't you can undo it whatever it was it you know it worked pretty well i think back in the day when we had you first in the pod and for several years after that you had closer to what would seemingly look like a 90 000 website And I think it was about a year or two ago you've gone the direction you've gone.
So you haven't always had this, you know, you've had this minimalistic opinion, but it didn't seem like you were this plain.
That's probably the way it's said, you know.
So this is very close to plain text.
It's not a pejorative.
Our previous website was also extremely good, done by an extremely talented set of people.
um and it got copied there was actually people that open sourced libraries to cop out copy our like gradient hero and i someone said to me recently like they remember that year when we had that website they saw copies of it everywhere and we did like people ripped that old website off so now i'm saying it's like what we're doing right now is figuring out the new one and i'm like when we tried really hard people loved it and like it was good when we didn't try at all People also loved it and copied both versions.
Now I kind of feel like the pressure is on to do something else that's a bit crazy.
I'm not trying to pretend I'm some design genius and we're going to come up with anything amazing.
But you do feel that kind of like, huh, like we also didn't try to do those things.
We just did things that made sense to us.
But it gives you that pressure to like think, hmm, what can we do this time that's special?
Maybe we've found it.
I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see what people think.
I'm sure they won't be afraid to tell me online.
Since you're a spicy-natured fella, that's probably the sweetest thing I could probably say.
That's cool.
I like that.
Say something meaner.
I'm enjoying my own words.
I'm sorry, Sam.
Say something meaner.
I'd like to do it.
Keep this in as well.
Don't cut it.
Say something meaner.
What do you think the worst?
No, no, no.
I really meant that in that way.
I liked how it sounded.
I had to laugh.
It's like a comedian on the stage laughing at their own joke.
That's like, you shouldn't do that.
So I did that.
No, it's good.
I'm sorry about that.
You should enjoy it.
Maybe I'm spicy.
I don't know.
You are spicy.
Maybe everyone's bland.
Isn't that wrong with that, man?
Listen, I live in Texas and it's just fine to be spicy.
Okay.
Just fine.
That's true.
I want to go to this level because this is something that I've had.
We've had podcasts on this.
We've talked about multigress.
We've talked to Sugu.
We've talked to.
I'm even an investor in Superbase.
I'm a small angel investor in Superbase.
Well, that was a very good investment.
I didn't get a chance to give you money, so I couldn't be an angel investor for you.
Well, that was an exceptional investment because they've built a very valuable business.
Yeah.
I've only had two angel investments.
That's my best one.
Okay.
Good.
Congratulations.
Not very many angel investments on my side, but that one I think is paying off very well, and I'm happy about that.
I've got friends.
who use Superbase.
And I'm like, why do you use it?
And these are obviously, well, I shouldn't say that.
They're newer to software development, aka vibe coding, which is just fine.
You know, everybody's got to start somewhere in the old area.
That is their audience.
And they've done a phenomenal job of building that audience.
They have millions of people that are vibe coding on that platform.
I'm like, why are you using Superbase?
Like, that's where my database is.
I'm like, is that it?
Is that all you're using them for is just a Postgres database?
Okay, fine.
They're doing incredible work from this.
I digress.
They've ridden this wave and they had great experience.
I think they should feel very proud of themselves and they've created an amazing business.
Most people have not done that.
It's amazing.
What are your thoughts on what you're doing with Neeky and Multigress?
How do those two rub, I suppose, in the marketplace?
It's their attempt.
There is, like you've just referred to, there is one of the people that created for Tess.
at youtube and was a co-founder of plant scale that it is a super base doing this and a couple of ex-employees um you know they are the competition is good they're welcome to go and do this it's it's great it's it's different i'll tell you how it's different well first of all i'll address that sugu left the company before we had a single sharded customer in production and so the The thing that I don't like about this situation is the perception that someone who made PlantScale what it is today has gone to Superbase.
That is completely untrue.
If you look at the version of the company pre-2020 and 2021, that is the counterfactual to what PlantScale could have been, and it was not.
And now PlantScale is what it is now.
He played no role in what it is now.
And so when people online make takes about, oh, you know, they're going to...
Superbase has a shot of becoming anything like PlanScale.
That is just not true.
None of the PlanScale DNA has gone to Superbase.
So I can correct that.
Like leaving that early in a company that has achieved so much since that period of that person leaving is hardly the boon people think it is.
But that's fine.
And I wish him well.
I don't like talking about individuals and their histories, but they have had no problem trying to claim the Vitesse name and claim an association with PlanScale.
I don't like that.
So what they're building, I have no doubt will be of quality.
And the people that are building it are not unserious and they are not bad engineers.
However, they're in a business that does different things.
It is not the union of the 15 years experience of a test, the five years of building PlanScale and all the other things that we do.
And so it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
I wish everyone well.
I think it's great building software.
However, when nearly like there's customers that are still on their homepage that have migrated to us already.
Well, now we do Postgres, the logos that are on our page and you consider the long-term sustainability of what it takes to build a sharded product and the companies that run on sharding.
A company that's really only serviced by coders is not going to compete with a company that has done the opposite of that and is running some of the world's largest databases.
And that will prove out.
But at the end of the day, I would not try and go after their audience because I don't believe I could.
Right.
I do not believe.
And until I maybe will believe that one day, but I try and stay humble and say, I would not try and compete with Superbase right now on Vibe Coding, on Backends as a Service.
They've done a really good job at this.
They are welcome to try and compete on.
what we do which is what they think they're doing with multigres but as someone has been through this um there is many more things that are not just you don't just have a an open source like sharding tool is not it is their record with security is very publicly quite bad like we do not have that right these are all things that enterprises care about um at the end of the day when i've seen the largest database that they ever had that moved to us and it was like I mean, minuscule in comparison to it was far below our average customer size.
It's going to be a long battle when they have to like, do you envision a world where they'll sit opposite a giant sharded post-growth customer versus us?
And what's your largest customer?
And ours is four orders of magnitude larger.
I mean, I don't know.
We'll see.
I like the competition, but I don't really think about.
Like there's other ones that are trying other sharding ones.
It's like, why have I do it?
I just don't think about it.
I, we are on schedule.
We're on our schedule.
When it comes to database scaling, we set that standard industry wide.
You have to start being like, you have to focus in other places if you want to win that way.
But I do wish them well.
And I wouldn't hate to communicate any disrespect for the incredible business that they have built.
Yeah.
So you mentioned having extraordinary engineers and you mentioned having, uh, The ability to give those extraordinary engineers artificial intelligence, AI, right?
Models, LLMs, Anthropic, Cloud, Codex, pick your flavors.
I know what my flavors are.
I say use them all, of course, right?
Use the ones that work for you.
You've got Niki out there.
You're not sure about open sourcing it for all the reasons we've already talked about, but what was it like to take that exceptional engineering team, 50?
how many ever was necessary or how many ever you sliced off from that larger swath of folks to build out Nikki.
What was it like to kind of have a redo?
I would call it like I've been enjoying the redos in, in this AI world because there's, there's so much more possible.
I'm almost happy to fail at trying to implement something because I learned.
And then my next version would just be that much better and more closer to what I actually want to deliver.
So what was it like having had that many years of experience with Vitesse, this brand new superpower, some of the most amazing engineers out there anyways, and then here you go and you're building Niki.
What was that like?
Phenomenal.
It's just been amazing.
To watch people that are so good at what they do and their craft, to have superpowers to build.
Now, we are not just vibe coding this thing, right?
I sure am not.
To be generous, the Multigres team as well, they did a really good post about how they used AI to build and people also interpreted that as file coding, which I don't think that's what they were doing either, right?
Like some exceptional engineers are building really, really quickly.
But I'm watching phenomenal people build in phenomenal ways with AI.
And I thought Niki would take two to three years, right?
We're a year in and we're already moving customers now.
That is like, and I thought three years with like earlier AI, right?
Like how it was a year ago when we started this.
And then I also thought, you know, just doing 15 years of work that quickly, right?
Like now, is it got feature parity with the test?
No.
Will it get there soon enough?
Yes.
It is amazing.
It's actually a great kind of meditation on the fact that code was just...
a thing you had to get through and that taste and now that's a terribly overused word, so whatever, but like, but your taste, your biases, your experience fed into things that will write the code is truly where it was like, and it gives me like, there's a lot of people feeling despair about AI.
We are ingenious creatures.
We have engineered our way off of this planet to the depths of the ocean.
We've engineered our environment around us.
AI will be a tool to do that.
And when AI takes over more and our ingenuity gets flowed into that machine, we will gain more as a species.
So it's very exciting to me to see this and see how we engineer using these tools.
And the productivity is there.
And it does truly gel with the belief that I have and other people have that this stuff will scale the expertise that companies have.
We are proving that right now.
like the knowledge that things we know, the proprietary knowledge we know about running databases at this scale can influence how we build and produce something very quickly.
And that shows that there is an incredible moat to experience and intelligence and your company's culture and the way you build and the targets you set for yourself.
And code is always just a...
syntax that you had to build and you had to be smart of reading it and you had to be really good at coding and there's a massive power law to the distribution like his ability to code has been unfairly distributed across the industry but if you're listening to this and you're skeptical to AI I hate to tell you that it's here and that it's happening and the best engineers are engineering in phenomenal ways.
I'm also happy to tell you it's nowhere near too late to adopt these tools.
The hype sloplords on Twitter that are just...
saying random stupid things and making everyone get triggered and upset are wrong.
They've always been here.
They've existed throughout the industry.
Dumb people have dumb takes on tech.
The good people that are good at engineering look at this as a thing to engineer and they just engineer it.
And so it has been amazing to have that do over.
And it taught me so many lessons that I knew in an abstract way after building software for 20 years.
But now I really know it.
Yeah.
Do you think there's one part of my question that you didn't answer very well?
And I'm just curious about this and that's fine.
is the redo part of it.
Do you feel like, you know, I don't want to say that necessarily because I'm not sure of the actual code.
I haven't read it because it's not open source and that's cool.
But when we look at Niki and the opportunity to redo, you mentioned it's not quite where Vitesse is at.
Will it be eventually, of course.
But was it a joy for you and for others that were involved in writing this code or, you know?
operating the AI that wrote the code and all the wisdom that came from that.
Was it cool?
Was it fun to do a redo or a take two on what the test was for my sequel to do what Nikki is for, for Postgres members of that team have told me that they're having the most fun of their career.
Like just to start with an empty repo.
Heck yeah.
Like we had this meeting, we all got together and we just talked about like, how are we going to build this?
Like, what are the main lessons we learned from taking Vitesse?
And like, Vitesse was built by very smart people at Google, right?
And they did an incredible thing breaking out of Google and did all these things.
And like I said, Vitesse has grown and become a real mature product in the last five years.
In the last five years since 2021, its usage has gone up 65,000%.
It's pretty good.
It's used by more people now than it ever has been.
But like, there's nothing like that get in it on all of your like washing all your sins away and trying again.
And the test is an amazing piece of software.
But you, of course, if you can just start from what you do it some days, you do it just anyway, right?
You like take one crack at something and go, okay, I learned like I felt around.
I learned all the things.
i'm going to just refresh and just like do the first shot again and it works um and it goes well and so doing that decade scale with massive customers running on it you just make things differently like vitess is still a phenomenal piece of engineering and it is far superior to nikki is right now or anything else out there in terms of database scalability but over time nikki may outdo it just from the sheer nature that it's like The architecture is different and we're very, very excited about it.
And we are excited to keep pushing Vitesse.
Vitesse is getting new things added continually because of some of the things that MySQL can do.
Like, I wouldn't say one's going to be better actually than the other.
It's going to be different.
But taking a database system that's similar to MySQL in architecture, there's still a SQL database, and then doing it again, incredible fun.
Like the real do-over was incredible fun.
Everyone's enjoyed it.
I feel very lucky to watch that teamwork.
Yeah.
Both sides of the major database coin, MySQL and Postgres, will forever be in some version of a war.
We've always been around here, Postgres for life, so thank you for coming around, Sam, even though you feel that Postgres is, in fact, inferior to MySQL, and we'll leave that for a different day.
Oh, can I hit that nuance there?
Sure, sure.
It is just different.
right my sequel lost lost the crown because they stopped listening to their users they stopped building for developers it is a very good database to operate and i think it is still easier to operate than postgres right like high availability is easier all of these things like we we run into so many issues with customers and you just have to explain to them this is how postgres does it vacuuming is bad because it's a core thing like yeah like it's a core decision similar to the replication is not how I would like it to be, but it's different.
They have a different philosophy and they've achieved something phenomenal.
They, it is the default database now because people have done a good job of helping you operate it.
Heroku, us, the major clouds have taken that pain away.
And so now you're left with a dev interface and the extensions ecosystem.
So much better, so much better.
So I love Postgres now, like getting to work with that audience and see these brilliant and amazing companies.
And using it and then to bring something truly differentiated from our biases in the MySQL world, it's phenomenal.
So I wouldn't say one's better or worse.
They're just different.
But they will get better over time.
Or they all wear them.
I hope we can play a role in making both better continually over time.
Well, you're a minute or two away from a customer call.
And I appreciate you going literally to the one yard line with me on this podcast.
Is there anything you want to say in closing, just as we tail out, end of the show, anything whatsoever?
I loved the episode we recorded all those years ago.
It was one of my favorite that I've ever done.
It's one of the ones that people have referred to over the years, and people still, you know, that was maybe how they heard a plant scale, and they're very complimentary about.
how we both did on that show.
And so I'm really glad to be back.
And it's amazing to see these enduring things that, that go through this ever, like the industry has changed a lot while you do what you do.
And so it's, it's amazing to have something enduring that we, we anchor on and I enjoy listening and I enjoy, I've enjoyed being part of it.
So I just want to say thank you, Adam, for everything you've done for all of us that are listeners and for building something that you should be very proud of and that we like subscribing to.
And I really enjoyed being part of too.
And I'm very happy to be back with a company that's defaulted live with hopefully users listening now and potential users in the future.
So thank you to yourself and your audience and everyone involved.
So you've got something enduring and really amazing.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's been a lot of work, as you know, over the years.
I mentioned the pod.
Our inception was, our birth date was November 2009.
So we've been here for a very long time.
We're coming up on our next birthday here.
Later this year, and I forget how many years it's been, but as long as I care about this community, which I think will be the day I die, I'll be producing some version of a podcast.
Hopefully it is always the Change Law because I feel like the name we chose, changelaw.com even, is like you can't erase it.
It's an institution.
It may change and have different variations over the years, but I feel like we've always struck the right balance of who to talk to, why to talk to them.
et cetera.
And obviously having you a part of that has been amazing.
So thank you, Sam.
And thank you for all the work you do at PlanetScale and the whole team there.
And just being you.
It's not me.
It's our customers.
We're only here because of our customers.
Thank you to all of them.
We love our customers.
They're very special people.
But you have truly achieved the changelog for the industry.
You've been doing this long.
You've tracked the change.
You know what you should do is you should go back and like...
reflect on old episodes.
I bet you've got some amazing people that aren't like, there's like, you could do a super car.
Yeah.
I mean, like it has really been the change log for the industry and you should keep going.
Cause we're about to enter a new era that will be fun and different and really cool.
I think so too.
This next era is going to be interesting.
And, uh, I, I sure hope we all endure it.
As you've said, I sure hope we can.
And we do because things change seemingly every single day, but Sam, thank you so much for.
being a friend, coming back on the pod, sharing all your wisdom and really just sharing the struggle of what it takes to last in this industry and what it takes to be a great player in this industry.
I appreciate your perspective, your wisdom and your team, your product and your customers.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You better keep that glazing in.
If I hear that edited out, I will be furious at you.
You better sit there and have other people go, wow, yeah, actually.
Now I think about it.
Adam is amazing and we're grateful.
Oh, man.
You better keep it in.
I will be so mad.
You'll get my Twitter if you don't.
Well, friends, thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Change Law.
Joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale.
Big fan of what they're doing over there.
Love the way Sam has led this company.
You know, love the...
almost died but not default dead now they are default alive and thriving which is cool databases have been all the rage for a very long time for obvious reasons and now in this agentic era we're in with agent skill being slung around everywhere we need planet scale we need planet scales to focus on mysql to focus on postgres to focus on nikki to focus on metal to focus on mvme based databases and that's cool stuff and so i hope you enjoyed the show a massive thank you to our friends who have sponsored this pod we got our good friends over at build kite our good friends obviously in partners over at fly and our good friends over at coda.com and of course to the beat freak in residence break master cylinder all right friends this show's done we'll see you again very soon